Friday, September 9, 2011

Much as I love Star Wars and Star Trek (which celebrated the 45th anniversary of its first airing yesterday). I have to admit that I've grown completely tired of humanoid aliens. I understand why, in the old days, they were a necessary evil, but, nowadays, there's usually little justification for them. And in literature? They were never needed. I'm much happier with alien beings that don't look as if they could just be a guy in a suit.

So, my question is: what are your favorite non-humanoid aliens? By "non-humanoid," I mean beings that don't look anything remotely like a human being. Adding another head or extra limbs or whatever does not count. I'm talking aliens like Star Trek's Horta, Traveller's Hivers, or Ringworld's Puppeteers. By my definition of "non-humanoid," something like the Hutts from Star Wars would not count, since they're basically just big humanoids with tails instead of legs.

99 comments:

I don't know that I agree with the notion that humanoid aliens are a technical limitation at all! In television & film-- any visual medium-- there is a strong argument to be made for them, as they allow actual actors to play the roles, with faces & body language & eyes & all that. In games, there is the sheer fact that...well, it is a lot easier to build a dude with a wrinkly forehead & a +2 to strength than it is to build something truly inhuman. It is a genre convention, is my point, I guess. Not an issue of justification any more than the sound of lasers in space is there because Space Opera writers don't know the science better.

Anyhow, my favorite? I'm a big fan of Gene Wolfe's shapeshifting Abos in "The Fifth Head of Cerberus."

Star Control 3 makes them these sinister bad guys in league with otherworldly forces. While I like how their voices were done in SC3, I prefer their original, chirpy, (only) slightly sinister and completely inscrutable nature in SC2.

Now that I think of it, there are fairly few good non-humanoid aliens in science fiction literature. Niven's Kzinti, Vance's Dirdir, Pnume, Chasch, all humanoid or humanoid-ish.

I think the explanation is mostly that authors want their readers to be able to relate to their aliens as sentient beings on SOME level. It's difficult to imagine human beings having any sort of interaction with totally bizarre betentacled aliens, energy creatures, or other bizarre forms.

On the other hand, there's a school of thought that posits that many alien species, if they evolved under similar conditions to those on Earth, would tend to approximate the human form through parallel development (bilateral symmetry, bipedal form to free a set or sets of limbs for manipulation of tools, etc.). Perhaps those creatures "out there" that we'd be capable of communicating with would be more like us than not.

I'm in the same boat James. I've been working on non-humanoid aliens for X-Plorers. The problem is then you're basing it off of animals or plants, or a combination therof.

But then to players eye's roll when you try and describe something no one's seen before or can relate to? Imagine trying to describe the big monster on the ice planet from the recent Star Trek movie to someone who's never seen it. If it's too hard to draw a mental picture you risk losing your audience.

Also -- there are a whole bunch of truly awesome not at all humanoid aliens in a hopelessly obscure old SF RPG supplement, _Spacefarer's Guide to Alien Races._ I could pick several dozen non-humanoid aliens out of that.

Firstly, I agree with T-Boy, the Orz are *Spicy Fun*! *Jumping Peppers*!

I really liked the 'tines' of _A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep_ by Vernor Vinge. Looking like packs of smallish dogs, they're a race of creatures that only sustain full conscious thought in groups of 3-5. They're also extremely hampered by the lack of any gripping appendages besides their mouths.

We just had a big debate over the lack of non-humanoid, non-Star Trekish or non-Star Warian aliens in the wargaming miniatures markets, specifically for 15mm.

Everybody wants them, but its a real gamble for a manufacturer if he gets no interest on a 'miss'. In the RPG market, its certainly a more approachable issue. But overall, I think everyone at this point would applaud non humanoid aliens. Although wrapping your head around a silica based instead of carbon based llife form may take a bit for some to wrap their heads around.

Check out Expedition by Barlowe for inspriation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_(book)

Favorites - how about the ancient and intelligent Martian mountains of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land? Psychic pacifists who nevertheless decide to destroy Earth for the danger it poses to the galaxy.

Then there are the Space Dragons and Intelligent cats of Cordwainer Smith. If you haven't read any of his works, do yourself a favour and get some, but they might be hard to track down.

The traversers in Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, which I read recently, are awesome. Colossal plants that have evolved spider-like characteristics and traverse webs between the Earth and a locked Moon, soaking up solar rays. They are only barely sentient, though.

In line with what Dhowarth discussed above, in a large enough area of the galaxy/universe, with a planet of similar climate to Earth, convergent evolution might produce some aliens that are similar in shape to human. Think whales and whale sharks.

Again from Traveller - Whispers of the Outcast Sky, how they were originally illustrated in Challenge not GURPS. Then there was the race of intelligent worms from T4. Much of what T4 did was bad but the idea behind some of them could be salvaged.

Ogri from Doctor Who - just love the idea that Stonehenge could have bloodthirsty silicon lifeforms capable of surviving hundreds of years. That has seeped into many Call of Cthulhu game.

AGRA from 2300AD proving that the Ascended do play dice with the universe and cause us to go mad.

Gibberlin' Mouther - or that creature that was from C1. This is how I pictured Shoggoth.

Pretty limited knowledge in this department, but two aliens come to my mind from the Star Wars films. The first is the Sarlacc, that mighty-mouth of Return of the Jedi. The second was that giant worm in the asteroid in Empire Strikes Back. I liked those because they got my mind to thinkun'. How does a giant worm in an asteroid survive? What does it eat? How often can it eat? And the Sarlacc, digesting over a 1000 years? What does that mean, outside of sounding pretty darn unpleasant? It also gave me the feeling I had in the first three movies that time in that galaxy might not be what time was in ours (something the prequels pretty much dashed). So that's my two cents, obvious as they are.

I can't remember the book unfortunately (I think it was called Footfall), but the aliens looked like baby elephants with complex multi-fingered trunks instead of hands. Not the most imaginative idea, but wierd enough to have stuck with me all these years.

My favorite non-humanoid that comes immediately to mind are the Knnn of CJ Cherryh's "Chanur" novels. Here's their Wikipedia entry:

"Knnn, the third methane breathing species, multi-legged tangles of wiry black hair, are the most technologically advanced in the Compact. Unlike other known species, they can maneuver in hyperspace and carry other ships with them. Only tc'a can communicate with them (or claim they can); the knnn are incomprehensible and therefore deemed dangerous by the other species, not to be provoked. They trade by snatching whatever they want and leaving whatever they deem sufficient as payment behind; it is an improvement over their prior habit of just taking trader ships apart."

I'm fond of living starships: the Leviathans in Farscape, Overlords in Starcraft, and especially Gomtuu in the ST:TNG episode "Tin Man." I liked the idea that such a ship could form a self-sufficient ecosystem with its crew and operate indefinitely.

The G'woth from Larry Niven's Ringworld prequel trilogy. They live in the liquid ocean below the ice crust of their planet and appear to communicate and increase their mental power by joining one or more appendages with other G'wo. They looks similar to starfish, and their hides can change color, possibly with their mood. Fantastic ability to learn!

Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is a planet-encompassing sea that is actually a single organism, intelligent but with a mind so incredibly alien as to render attempts at communication futile.

I once read a short story - can't remember the name - centring around an alien referred to as "The Goblin", which was actually a probe constructed by the inhabitants of a universe that was a sort of inverted image of our own - incredibly high energy and mostly ultra-dense matter, as opposed to our universe which is mostly nothingness. From their perspective, the probe was so low-energy that it barely existed at all, but in our universe it was a blinding white light that disintegrated people with its eager attempts to communicate.

I agree a lot of what others have said, but I think the Iain Banks' Dwellers from the Algebraists deserve a mention, definitely the Ahoggya and Ssu from Tekumel and the Moties from Niven and Pournelle's Mote in God's Eye.

Heinlein's Star Beast. A xenophobic star faring race at the edge of human space which look like small brontosauruses {the book predates the switch to apatosaurus}. They don't grow arms until maturity and grow bigger rather than fatter when they over eat. And they can eat just about anything from scrap iron to grizzly bears. They also speak in piping little girl voices.

"The Festival", from Charlie Stross, are an inscrutable collection of beings that had evolved past the technological singularity and caravanned around the galaxy dropping cornucopia machines on unsuspecting civilizations. The weird "Critics" are then sent out to observe and judge the creations of these civilizations that were hard-birthed into the post-singularity. Then the Festival moves on for greener pastures, leaving a wake of chaos in its path.

I also like Aineko, a massively intelligent AI that uses the form of a cat to better manipulate the humans around it.

I don’t know about favorites. (I guess I tend to prefer humanoid—or human—aliens.) First things that came to mind—besides the HPL and Orson Scott Card entities already mentioned—were the “wheel men” and a cylindrical lensman from Doc Smith.

Doctor Who had a human that had become just a square of skin, a face, and a brain in a jar. Human but not humanoid.

I always liked the tyranids from Warhammer 40K, which are xenomorphs akin to the Alien(s) from the movies of the same names. The hivemind mentality among several distinct races of mostly mindless creatures bent on consuming the universe just sounds fun.

This is going to absolutely destroy my credentials as an SF fan, but the aliens in early Piers Anthony, especially the Slash and Polarans from the Cluster series and the Manta. Mainly because he considered how the various shape would change how a race would think/philosophy. And they were decidedly alien.

In an effort to restore some seeming of reputation, second up would have to be the various non-DBDG species in the Sector General series by James White. Especially the Kelgians, Hudlar, and Tralthans. When you have to construct a classification system to keep your alien species sorted, you know you have to deal with a lot of aliens. There was one indie UK RPG [name escapes me] that lifted it wholesale to define the aliens you encountered in their game and it worked well.

Some of Stephen Baxters aliens in the Xeelee series, where he had the philosophy that and pattern that could self-replicate could qualify as alive, so some of his aliens were vortices in a high temperature environment (Conway's game of Life taken to the extreme).

If I was going to run Cosmic Patrol I'd probably borrow all the aliens from the new FFG version of Cosmic Encounter to inhabit the universe. I wonder how long it would take the players to realize. And speaking of which, honourable mention to the aliens of Spaceship Zero (probably the first published Cthulhoid space game).

And, my favourite Dr Who alien - Alpha Centauri (Curse of Peladon, Monster of Peladon) - closely followed by the Daleks, of course. Actually the cheap production values of the original Dr Who meant that they were capable of portraying a lot more completely non-humanoid aliens than if they had the flashy CGI of the new series doing it. Probably the Uncanny Valley effect.

"Apparently at one point the Bible describes angels as looking like two wheels, one within the other, both rimmed with eyes."

The Book of Ezekiel. "Ezekiel's Wheels" have also been "theorized" to be UFOs. James often talks about the blending of science fiction and fantasy in early D&D, so this would be easy to work into a game either as aliens or their ships.

SF author Michael Flynn's book The January Dancer has the most bizarre non-humanoid race I've ever read about.

The basic premise is that a salvage crew led by a man named January uncover a treasure trove of artifacts from a pre-human civilization on a distant world. One such artifact is a strange stone that seems to change shape as you look at it. It comes to be known as The Dancer, and the book is a series of initially non-related plot threads that all tie together quite nicely by the climax, where we are introduced to the last member of the ancient race to which the Dancer belonged.

Great read, I don't want to reveal what the alien looks like because it will ruin the book. HIGHLY recommended, as is his first novel, The Wreck of the River of Stars.

Idirans from Ian Banks's Consider Phlebas, tripodal and nearly indestructible ... although they might be too humanoid, given they only have two arms (the third limb specialized into a sound-producing organ).

Space Gamer ran a contest for nonhuman races, and the winner was in issue #40, a tripodal race called the Mittsuashi that moved by spinning. I'm less keen on the whole Japanese motif, but their physical structure stuck with me.

While I have to give props to the Color Out Of Space, Solaris, and other aliens-as-plot-device, aliens as characters interest me more.

Jarts, from Greg Bear's Eon. To be honest can't remember now if the things I have in mind are Bear's originals or my own adaptation of them, but they were kinda insecty, kinda Lovecraftian, and grew metal legs.

If you demand aliens that aren't humans, insects, cephalopods or "pure thought"... the field shrinks dramatically. Although many of Lovecraft's, and Douglas Adams' Hooloovoo, are still in the running.

I like the "continuous creation" races in Pratchett's pastiche "Strata". "The Wheelers were silicon hemispheres, propelling themselves on three natural wheels."; "a Palaeotech -- dead, at least by human terms [...] It was a thin-walled tube half a million miles long."; "ChThones, who spun giant stars out of galactic matter, and the RIME, who produced hydrogen as part of their biological processes..."

I liked the Cheela, from Robert Forward's Hard Sci-Fi Book "Dragons Egg" An alien lifeform that lived on the surface of a nuetron star. They were about the size of a seasame seed, saw in the ultra-violet to X-ray range of light, and loved sex, which they called "flowing". They were as smart as humans, but lived a million times faster than us. Their lifespan was about 40 minutes in our time. A great book, even if the human characters are little flat. Once I read that book....I never saw aliens the same again.

To really describe a non-humanoid non-anthropomorphized alien the author has to be good enough to conceptualize truly alien. That is why most Elves are portrayed slender humans with pointy years who routinely live for centuries. Now consider a human being who lived to the Biblical 500-700 years, what impact would remainign in your prime for that long have on your emotional, cultural or intellectual development, not to mention accumulation of wealth and power over a 500 year career. That is why I run a humans only campaign, and Elven is just as alien as other humanoid races.

With regards to the atempts to describe truly incomprehensible races, there is, of course, Stanislaw Lem Solaris, and Strugatskii brothers' Travelers' Extinct alien race that left its artefacts for the space faring humanity to discover (with the late 1960's they were probbaly the first), in 1972 they wrote a Roadside Picnic novel, about a UFO landing that dumped its trash on Earth and contaminated the planet with its organisms and artefacts. They did an awesome job describing samples of alien technology (based on the earthly effects of advanced physcial chemistry and nuclear physics still not widely known). Somebody, I don't remember who, described a an alien race of beings based on crystaline structure. These things (very much like silicone 10 foot space amoebas) live off the solar radiation and extinguish stars. hey are able to costruct larger structures, which able to fight off the aliens UFOs trying to defend thesir Suns from premature extinction. Story was told from a point of view of an eartling who was kidnapped by the aliens fighting these things.

There was a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode with some kind of telepathic mineral (or maybe crystal?) organism that referred to its human captors as "ugly bags of mostly water". I always liked that one.

-Octavia Butler's Oankali are very interesting: 3 sexes, one of which acts as a genetic engineer between males and females. So many cool features of these things. Ability to mate with almost anything in the universe. A mass of tendrils that end in needle sharp, syringe-like points.

-Almost every race in M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel setting: SSu, Mnor, Yazai, Tinaliya, Ahoggya, Hokun, Hluss, Pe Choi. Too many to even really try to list. Hands down one of the best and richest settings ever for non-humanoid intelligent species.

The "Grey Aliens" of modern UFO myth. They are anthropomorphic, but only vaguely so.Actually a lot of UFO occupants are decidedly weird - especially back in the 50s and 60s. Look up the Flatwoods Monster.These are not supposed to be fictional, but as Jacques Valees or Jung would have it, they derive more from the mass mind or from some disincarnate intelligence than from some space faring civilization.

"alien" as a concept in general is boring. its just anthropomorphized beings. which leans toward the "we humans invented a god that resembles us, as we invented aliens that resemble us or other creatures we are aware of."

or we militarize them the same way as western cultures militarize, etc... aliens usually just become veneers of some concept we are already aware of. dressing it up with aesthetic masks is supposedly creating a dynamic, new, "science" based way of dealing with them. "oh sure, they all created spaceships and lazer guns. weeee." for juvenile fun, it works. for any real discussion, its boring.

if anything, Lovecraft's inability to particularly describe his creations seems to be the best so far at creating the idea of an "alien" that is of massive, hyper, cosmic scale. now that's something legit and philosophically interesting.

offer me something more radical and the alien question becomes more legit.

aliens in the traditional anthropomorphized sense have the opportunity to be interesting in an animistic sense. it might teach us that others/non-humans are legit actors in histories.

I think Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle come up with fantastic aliens, particularly because they all so well worked out, each come with an alien psychology. like the Fithp (quadruped elephants with multiple trunks) who have a strong herd mentality, the fatalistic Moties, Sesile Grogs (telepathic creatures that physically devolved into fat stumps with no prehensile limbs.

I also like Larry Nivens humanoid aliens in ringworld - where you get Hominids evolving to fill every ecological niche, I find this particularly awesome because of extint hominid species on earth like Neanderthals and homoflorensis (trolls and hobbits if ever there were)

I particularly like the Muuh and the To'ul'h from Orion's Arm. The former are strange vaguely (And I emphasize vaguely) crab-like creatures from a world similar to Titan, while the To'ul'h are strange gliding creatures from a world with conditions part way between Venus and Earth.

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